The lubrication of feeder shear blades have always been a problem in the production of glass hollow ware by automatic methods. The constant evolution of performance of glass machines requires a parallel progression of specific equipment, for example for dosing, mixing and circulating soluble oil and water used for cooling and lubricating shear blades. The production of good quality bottles depends to a great extent on many factors one of which is the cutting of gobs of proper weight.
Furthermore, it has become, for compliance with the Federal waste water standards, necessary to use an oil which is not soluble in water in order to be able to clean up the plant effluent. This therefore requires a system for injecting the oil in the water, and then provide sufficient control over the mixing of the two so that the resulting shear spray when entrained in air will not be overloaded with oil, or will not have sufficient cooling properties so as to ineffectively cool the blades of the shears. In practice, there is often a significant difference between the theoretical percentages of oil and water to be mixed and the actual quantity of oil actually being mixed with the water. In fact, dosing the actual percentage turns out to be a compromise between the directions received and the equipment available, governed by personal experience of the operator.
One of the important aspects of this invention is that the system provided by the invention carefully controls the ratio of the oil to the water, and regardless of the extent of, or the amount of the shear spray being used, the ratio will be maintained constant. Furthermore, the ratio of oil to water may be changed at any desired time by merely changing the setting of the control system. Once the system, however, is in operation with the ratio preset, the operation will continue to operate and provide an oil to water ratio which is constant over a complete flow range.
With the foregoing in view, it is an object of the invention to provide an apparatus for spraying an oil-water mixture on shear blades of a molten glass shearing mechanism wherein a source of oil and water are connected to a ratio controller whose output is utilized to control the amount of oil metered into the water. The oil-water mixture is fed to a distributing and mixing block along with air under pressure. The oil-water mixture entrained in the air exits from the mixing block through individual conduits leading to spray heads, one for each shear blade.